mining has become a popular research topic in recent years for the treatment of the "data rich and information poor" syndrome. Currently, application oriented engineers are only concerned with their immediate problems, which results in an ad hoc method of problem solving. Researchers, on the other hand, lack an understanding of the practical issues of mining for real-world problems and often concentrate on issues that are of no significance to the practitioners. In this volume, we hope to remedy problems by (1) presenting a theoretical foundation of mining, and (2) providing important new directions for mining research. A set of well respected data mining theoreticians were invited to present their views on the fundamental science of data mining. We have also called on researchers with practical data mining experiences to present new important mining topics.